Black death

With the threat of bird flu and horse sniffles abounding, we can at least be thankful we aren't in peril of Bubonic Plague catching on any time soon. Dr Karl looks at the grim history of this particularly nasty affliction.

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The Black Death of the Middle Ages was a truly devastating pandemic – a pandemic being the Military-Industrial Full Blown Version of an epidemic. In the mid-1300s, the Black Death killed at least one third of the European population, so it was truly horrible. So most people think that the Black Death began in Europe – but it didn't.

There have been a dozen or so epidemics/pandemics documented in human history. Probably the earliest dates to the 11 century BC, and is reported in I Samuel 5:6 in the Torah. In 430 BC, The City of Athens lost one third of its people to the so-called Plague of Athens.

The first pandemic is possibly the Plague of Justinian (AD 541-542). It started around Egypt or Ethiopia, and then spread via the then-major city of Constantinople (killing 10,000 people per day at its peak) to wipe out one quarter of the inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Other great pandemics include the Black Death (mid-1300s), the Third Pandemic (from China to the world, 1855 to 1959, 12 million killed) and the Great Influenza Pandemic (from the USA to world, 1918-1920, 50-100 million killed).

The Black Death probably arose in 1334 in the Chinese province of Hubei. It appears to have spread to Europe along the Mongol trading routes, arriving in Constantinople in 1347. It was next reported in Caffa, a trading city on the Crimean peninsula.

Mongols were attacking the city, but their numbers dropped dramatically as the Black Death raged through their troops. They supposedly used the infected corpses of their own soldiers as biological weapons, catapulting them over the walls of the besieged city.

The Genoese inhabitants of Caffa fled back to their home ports in the south of Europe, taking the disease with them. It was disastrous. The ships returned, limping into ports, or being washed up on the shores, with most or all of the crew dead.

By 1347-48, the Black Death had spread to Genoa and Venice. Boccacio wrote that the victims, "ate lunch with their friends, and dinner with their ancestors in paradise".

By June 1348, it had reached England, France, Spain and Portugal. It took two more years to reach Scandinavia and another year to get to north-western Russia.

The Black Death also devastated the Middle East, reaching Antioch in 1348-49, Mecca and Mosul in 1349, and Yemen in 1351.

It then hung around until the 17th Century, with the Great Plague of 1665-1666 as one of its last outbreaks. With each successive return, fewer people died, because the genetically more susceptible people had already perished in earlier outbreaks.

The successive pandemics caused massive depopulation. In China, some two-thirds of the population died in eight geographically separate incidents from 1353 to 1354, after 90% of the people in Hubei had died in the initial outbreak. In Europe, some 70% of the people had died from the Black Plague by 1400, dropping the population from 7 million to 2 million.

In Damascus, some 25-40% of the people died, with 1,000 dying horribly each day at the peak of the outbreak.

The Black Death was many things, but it was not unique to Europe, and did not start there – it came from China.

The social effects were also long-reaching. The peasants who survived found themselves sought after as a source of labour, which the land-owners resented. There were peasant uprisings in France, Italy and England.

It is claimed that the sudden geographical movements of many English-speaking people led to the Great Vowel Shift, in which the pronunciation of English language changed dramatically.

Social barriers between the poor and the wealthy were torn asunder. Desperate laws were passed to stop newly-wealthy peasants from wearing the trappings of the wealthy.

The Roman Catholic Church was ineffectual against the plague, and lost much of its influence. It is even claimed that the Renaissance was a direct result of the Black Death.

They say that every cloud has a silver lining. Although in this case, it was a really big black cloud.